Category Archives: Philosophy

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

Making Ayn Rand Look Good

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Tyler Cowen has a brutal review of what looks to be an idiotic ant-capitalist documentary:

A few months ago I went back and tried to read some Ayn Rand. As Adam Wolfson has suggested recently in these pages, it wasn’t easy.1 I was put off by her lack of intellectual generosity. I read her claim that “collectivist savages” are too “concrete-bound” to realize that wealth must be produced. I read her polemic against the fools who focus on redistributing wealth rather than creating it. I read the claim that Western intellectuals are betraying the very heritage of their tradition because they refuse to think and to use their minds. I read that the very foundations of civilization are under threat. That’s pretty bracing stuff.

I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not (if the stalking presence of Naomi Klein has not already done so). If you are looking to benchmark this judgment, consider this: I would not say anything similar even about the movies of Michael Moore.

In this movie, the causes of poverty are oppression and oppression alone. There is no recognition that poverty is the natural or default state of mankind and that a special set of conditions must come together for wealth to be produced. There is no discussion of what this formula for wealth might be. There is no recognition that the wealth of the West lies upon any foundations other than those of theft, exploitation and the oppression of literal or virtual colonies.

“Narrated by Martin Sheen” would be the first clue.

Philosophy, Political Commentary

A Modest Proposal

25 Comments

Terry Savage has some suggestions for improvements to the Constitution, should there be a convention. I agree with some, disagree with others (mostly around the edges — for example, I see nothing about serving as a US Senator that would qualify one to be president, as the current occupant of the White House demonstrates), but they are all thought provoking and debate provoking.

Of course, my fear is that there were to be a convention, the result would be a document much more dedicated to “positive rights,” and an expansion of the franchise to non-citizens, and possibly the world…

Philosophy, Political Commentary

“A Deadly Race Between Politics And Technology”

31 Comments

Peter Thiel has some thoughts on the future of freedom, and its apparent incompatibility with democracy.

Because the vast reaches of outer space represent a limitless frontier, they also represent a limitless possibility for escape from world politics. But the final frontier still has a barrier to entry: Rocket technologies have seen only modest advances since the 1960s, so that outer space still remains almost impossibly far away. We must redouble the efforts to commercialize space, but we also must be realistic about the time horizons involved. The libertarian future of classic science fiction, à la Heinlein, will not happen before the second half of the 21st century.

I think he’s a little too pessimistic, but certainly we can’t count on it happening any sooner. But I don’t think that the existing governments will tolerate sea steading, if it appears to become significant.

[Via Brian Doherty, who has links to other voices in the debate]

[Update late morning]

Jonah Goldberg has some related thoughts, in the process of demolishing idiotic “progressive” arguments against the tea parties and “rightwing extremists”:

5. The populist anger out there is the real face of America’s homegrown fascism.

Sigh. While I think Rick Perry’s secession talk is idiotic and unfortunate (even accounting for Texas’ unique history), I am at a loss as to how any of this stuff smacks of fascism. Even Perry is talking in the context of the federal government doing too much, taking away too much liberty, getting too involved in local communities and interfering too much with the individual.

How do I say this so people will understand? Fascism isn’t a libertarian doctrine! It just isn’t, never will be and it can’t be cast as one. Anarchism, secessionism, extreme localism or rampant individualism may be bad, evil, wrong, stupid, selfish and all sorts of other things (though not by my lights). But they have nothing to do with a totalitarian vision of the state where individuals and institutions alike must march in step and take orders from the government.

If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.

Well, actually, subscribing to that ideology is just another form of being grotesquely ignorant. You can expand the state, or you can expand individual liberty, but you cannot do both.

[Bumped]

Philosophy, Political Commentary

Classical Versus Modern Liberals

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Alan Wolfe says there’s no distinction between them. Jonah Goldberg says that this is palpable nonsense:

Classical liberalism believed in objective rules constraining and delineating the role of government. Modern liberalism, born at the beginning of the twentieth century, holds that there are no rules rooted outside the prevailing sentiments of liberals themselves. It’s all up to what liberals decide is necessary. Stuart Chase — who reportedly coined the phrase “the New Deal” — argued that it was vital that liberals be put in charge of an “economic dictatorship.” “Why,” he asked, “should the Russians have all the fun remaking the world?” Thurmond Arnold, one of the intellectual titans of the New Deal, defined liberalism as “deuces wild.” Dewey believed there was no such thing as natural rights and argued for things like “social control.” Wilson believed that the U.S. Constitution — a classically liberal document, I think it’s fair to say — needed to be scrapped for a new, living constitution. Call me crazy, but I find these to be contrary, not merely “evolutionary” perspectives.

And he has some interesting thoughts from Albert Jay Nock:

…one never knew what Liberals would do, and their power of self-persuasion is such that only God knows what they would not do. As casuists, they make Gury and St. Alfonso dei Liguori look like bush-leaguers. On every point of conventional morality, all the Liberals I have personally known were very trustworthy. They were great fellows for the Larger Good, but it would have to be pretty large before they would alienate your wife’s affections or steal your watch. But on any point of intellectual integrity, there is not one of them whom I would trust for ten minutes alone in a room with a red-hot stove, unless the stove were comparatively valueless.

Liberals generally,—there may have been exceptions, but I do not know who they were,—joined in the agitation for an income-tax, in utter disregard of the fact that it meant writing the principle of absolutism into the Constitution. Nor did they give a moment’s thought to the appalling social effects of an income-tax; I never once heard this aspect of the matter discussed. Liberals were also active in promoting the “democratic” movement for the popular election of senators. It certainly took no great perspicacity to see that these two measures would straightway ease our political system into collectivism as soon as some Eubulus, some mass-man overgifted with sagacity, should manoeuvre himself into popular leadership; and in the nature of things, this would not be long.

All too prophetic.

[Early evening update]

Another nice find on Nock and liberalism:

The facts are clearly apparent. We now see on all sides the extraordinary spectacle of Liberals doing their best to destroy the cardinal freedoms and immunities which Liberals formerly defended, while all the forces which are historically and traditionally known as Tory or Conservative are arrayed in defense of those freedoms. Furthermore we see Liberals vehemently vilifying those who hold to the original basic principles of Liberalism, denouncing them as enemies of society, and doing all they can to discredit and disable them. These two are probably the strangest anomalies that recent history presents.

Of course, it’s become an old story by now.

History, Philosophy, Political Commentary

Speaking Of Pirates

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Did you know that they were early incubators of democracy?

Yes, those stereotypically lawless rum-chuggers turned out to be ardent democrats. And in their strange enlightenment, Leeson sees the answer to a riddle about human nature, worthy of “Lord of the Flies” or an early episode of “Lost.” In the absence of government and law enforcement, what becomes of a band of men with a noted criminal streak? Do they descend into violence and chaos?

The pirates who roamed the seas in the late 17th and early 18th centuries developed a floating civilization that, in terms of political philosophy, was well ahead of its time. The notion of checks and balances, in which each branch of government limits the other’s power, emerged in England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. But by the 1670s, and likely before, pirates were developing democratic charters, establishing balance of power on their ships, and developing a nascent form of worker’s compensation: A lost limb entitled one to payment from the booty, more or less depending on whether it was a right arm, a left arm, or a leg.

The idea of enlightened piracy is strange swill to swallow for those steeped in a pop culture version of the pirate – chaos on the high seas, drinking and pillaging, damsels forced onto the plank. Sure, there’s something about the independence of piracy that still speaks to people today. (Even the founders of International Talk Like a Pirate Day acknowledge that there is, in people who love to say “Aargh,” a yearning for a certain kind of freedom.) But it turns out that pirate life was more than just greedy rebellion. It offers insights into the nature of democracy and the reasons it might emerge – as a natural state of being, or a rational response to a much less pleasant way of life.

Of course, those were largely pirates of the Anglosphere. Somehow, I suspect that Somali Muslims might generate a different kind of pirate society.

Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

Some Thoughts On Charity

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Arnold Kling:

From a libertarian perspective, your generosity is reflected in what you do with your own money, not in what you do with other people’s money. If I give a lot of money to charity, then I am generous. If you give a smaller fraction of your money to charity, then you are less generous. But if you want to tax me in order to give my money to charity, that does not make you generous.

But it does seem to make you self righteous.

Philosophy, Science And Society

Multiverse Versus Intelligent Design

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A useful post from Jim Manzi:

we actually do have good scientific explanations for many of the phenomena that were claimed to be unexplainable without an intelligent designer. But scientific knowledge is never absolute, so there are always gaps, and therefore always space for such an argument. The problem with both ID and multiverse theory is the same: Neither is true and neither is false in a scientific sense; they are metaphysical frameworks with the scientific task of inspiring testable hypotheses, but are not themselves scientific theories capable of testing through scientific means.

It’s tempting to see ID and multiverse theory as mirror images — one looking desperately to prove scientifically that humans are special, and the other desperately seeking to avoid this conclusion. This is almost, but not quite, appropriate in my view. The proper question to ask about both multiverse theory and ID is whether they are fruitful. Ultimately, either each framework will help scientists develop physical theories in the form of predictive rules that can be tested through observation, or it will not. It’s very hard to see how ID can do this, but I guess that anything’s possible. Multiverse theory is more likely to do so, if only because it is a point of view that embeds a metaphysic that is far more congenial to so many more smart scientists.

But to look to science to answer a metaphysical questions like “Did God create us?” or “Are there completely unobservable aspects of reality?” is a category error of the first order.

Yup. As I’ve said repeatedly, science isn’t about proving that there is no God — it can never do so. It s about understanding the universe as much as possible on the assumption that there is none, or at least none that is rigging the game. The question of whether or not God exists is entirely orthogonal, and unaddressable by science.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Space

Why Are Spacers Libertarians?

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I’ve given up on bothering with the Elhafnawy piece any more. As Jim Bennett notes:

Why would anybody take Elhafnawy seriously? His representation of both the market-oriented space side of the argument and what he defines as “conservatives” are wildly atypical of either community.

It particularly strains credulity that he would represent Nicholson Baker, a whackadoodle pacifist with serious perception-of-reality problems, as any kind of “conservative.” There’s the definition of conservative that’s been in use in the English-speaking world for the past century or so, which is to say, preserving the values that support a constitutional representative political system with a market economy, and then there’s Elhafnawy’s definition. Elhafnawy should just invent a word, maybe (typing at random, here) “dhziuueybdcnma” or ” uaygsrabsjdbue” to represent whatever he is using the word “conservative’ to describe, and let the rest of us use the words of the English language as they are generally understood.

Not only “wildly atypical,” but completely unsubstantiated. If this were an academic paper, given its anecdotal quality (except it only has one actual anecdote, with an unnamed source), it would be tossed out. One has the feeling that he wanted to do a Diane Fosse thing, a sort of “spacers in the mist,” but couldn’t be bothered to actually document his observations. At least Fosse and Jane Goodall named names.

But for the two or three people who are on the edge of their seats, here’s my thesis.

It’s genetic.

OK, not quite that simple, but it’s true. I was born to think space is important. Now I don’t mean that it’s genetic in the sense that my whole family, or even any of my ancestors share my views, and passed them on to me. They didn’t and don’t. If they did and do, that would in fact be more of an argument that it’s environmental (we were all brought up to believe this) but we weren’t. I wasn’t. I was born this way, as surely as I was born an extreme heterosexual. I know other spacers who are the same way — no one else in their family is into space, no one taught or told them they should be, and yet they are.

Thus, it’s some weird recessive, or a mutation.

Which makes sense, given that there aren’t very many of us. There aren’t very many explorers in general. If everyone was out exploring all the time, nothing else societally useful would get done.

This is my explanation for “progressives” (such as Ferris Valyn or Bill White) who betray their ideology by supporting human expansion into space. 😉

Now, having said that, there is a political component, and a reason why there are an inordinate number of libertarians in the space movement (and space enthusiasts in the libertarian movement, with a significant overlap). I discussed it years ago, back in the early days of this weblog (no need to follow the link — I’m reposting in entirety):

As a follow up to today’s rant over our “allies” in Europe, over at USS Clueless, Steven den Beste has an excellent disquisition on the fundamental differences between Europe and the U.S. They don’t, and cannot, understand that the U.S. exists and thrives because it is the UnEurope, that it was built by people who left Europe (and other places) because they wanted freedom.

I say this not to offer simply a pale imitation of Steven’s disquisition (which is the best I could do, at least tonight), but to explain why I spend so much time talking about space policy here. It’s not (just) because I’m a space nut, or because I used to do it for a living, and so have some knowledge to disseminate. It’s because it’s important to me, and it should be important to everyone who is concerned about dynamism and liberty.

And the reason that it’s important is because there may be a time in the future, perhaps not even the distant future, when the U.S. will no longer be a haven for those who seek sanctuary from oppressive government. The trends over the past several decades are not always encouraging, and as at least a social insurance policy, we may need a new frontier into which freedom can expand.

Half a millenium ago, Europe discovered a New World. Unfortunately for its inhabitants (who had discovered it previously), the Europeans had superior technology and social structures that allowed them to conquer it.

Now, in the last couple hundred years, we have discovered how vast our universe is, and in the last couple decades, we have discovered how rich in resources it is, given will and technology. As did the eastern seaboard of the present U.S. in the late eighteenth century, it offers mankind a fertile petri dish for new societal arrangements and experiments, and ultimately, an isolated frontier from which we will be able to escape from possible future terrestrial disasters, whether of natural or human origin.

If, as many unfortunately in this country seem to wish, freedom is constricted in the U.S., the last earthly abode of true libertarian principles, it may offer an ultimate safety valve for those of us who wish to continue the dream of the founders of this nation, sans slavery or native Americans–we can found it without the flawed circumstances of 1787.

That is why space, and particularly free-enterprise space, is important.

And current events are not very encouraging with regard to the direction of the country. A significant number of people (though not, I think, despite the recent election results, a majority) want to Europeanize us. If it happens, there’s nowhere to go but up.

[Update early afternoon]

(“Progressive”) Ferris Valyn is soliciting ideas for a(nother) Netroots Nation discussion on space over at Kos (he really should get his own site). I find the “more progressive than thou” food fight in comments pretty amusing.

[Friday afternoon update]

I have a follow-on post here for anyone interested.